Legal Peer-to-Peer Music Website May Sign with Virgin Media

It is rumored that Playlouder, a website that offers, via BitTorrent, free music downloads to British users, will partner with Virgin media to give a wider range of playlists to its subscribers. Although people don't pay anything to listen to their favorite songs, the artists and distribution companies are retributed in accordance with the value of the tracks on the market. The only thing users have to do is subscribe to the website and pay a monthly $34 fee (actually, the equivalent in pounds).

"A set proportion of the revenues are set aside as a pool and split between the various music rights owners. Of this pool a percentage is paid to the record companies and a percentage to the music publishers (via the collection agency MCPS-PRS). The proportion paid to an individual record company is calculated on a pro rata basis according to the usage within the Playlouder network of that record company's music," the company explains how come users can download an infinite number of tracks with such a limited amount of money.

The only restriction that is applied is that people cannot share the tracks they had downloaded from Playlouder. Although they can download these songs using BitTorrent clients, they are forbidden from uploading them afterwards. This may cause some problems to the website, as peer-to-peer networks function exactly on this principle: people sharing their files. BitTorrent clients may even ban users who download from Playlouder, because they don't bring any benefit to the network, as they download, but don't share those files and use the bandwidth for themselves.

Someone restricting access to parts of his list not only doesn't comply with the general rules of p2p, but also decreases his chances to have a decent download speed. Download speed depends primarily on the bandwidth, but it also takes into account the number of files that are uploaded. Although the project seems reasonable for everyone, from users to music providers, it's hard to believe that the money from users' subscriptions, along with the advertising revenues can really level to the price of the content provided by music distribution companies. The success of the product remains yet to be evaluated in the course of time.